Sunday, July 12, 2009

Very good adventure story; later parts are too much like pulp era adventure, but I didn't mind.

Going by my experience with Western stories dealing with India, I guess Japanese readers will likely find some of the treatment too much of a caricature. But rest of us can have fun in an exotic setting.PS: Actually, Japan is nowhere explicitly named. I just ended up making the association. I wonder if author actually intended that readers make the association.

Story summary.

A Japanese frontier underwater colony called Golconda Station, on an icy waterworld call Ben. They've spent several generations terraforming this world; many more generations are still needed. It continues to be a very unfriendly world.

Circumstances will put a native Osaji, her dying & senile grandmother Mota, & a brash male visitor Jack on an "ark" - a kind of submarine vehicle that has severe navigational restrictions but can otherwise sustain its occupants forever. So off we go, on an adventure to uncharted parts of this world...